Keller @ Large: Warren Co-Sponsoring Bill To Protect Legal-Pot States
BOSTON (CBS) -- "Good people don't smoke marijuana," declared then-Senator Jeff Sessions during a 2016 Senate hearing on marijuana legalization. Since becoming attorney general, Sessions has continued to threaten a federal crackdown on states that have legalized the drug like Massachusetts and Colorado.
According to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), that attitude has helped galvanize bipartisan support for a new bill she's co-sponsoring with Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colorado) to protect legal-pot states from federal interference.
"Thanks to the Attorney General, more people feel the urgency of the moment in changing federal law on marijuana," she says, adding that the bill "regularizes" legalized marijuana "and means we in Massachusetts can go forward without fear of what the federal government or Jeff Sessions wants to do."
And in an exclusive interview with WBZ, Warren outlined another way in which Sessions might bring the two parties together in the near future -- in defiance of any effort by President Trump to fire Sessions as a first step toward ending Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe.
Even though Republicans have balked at passing a bill to protect Mueller, Warren told us she believes they wouldn't tolerate a Sessions firing to get at him.
"I truly believe if Donald Trump tries to fire Mueller, he would provoke a constitutional crisis," said Warren. "And that will create a problem here in Congress, it will create a problem throughout the United States larger than anything he has seen."